Election conspiracy theory hits home at a local DC pizza joint

One of the more outlandish, but widely shared conspiracy theories that emerged from the Wikileaks release of emails from a top aide to Hillary Clinton, surrounded pizza, what some claimed was a child sex trafficking operation that was linked to the Democratic nominee and her allies, based out of a Washington, D.C. neighborhood pizza restaurant.

On Sunday afternoon, a man walked into that restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, armed with a gun – in a neighborhood that sees very little in the way of violence.

It set off concerns about those conspiracy theory stories.

“A lot of us saw he had a gun and we all started getting our families out,” says man who was at Comet Ping Pong. https://t.co/u136HMMbRc

The incident was unsettling for a variety of obvious reasons, but also because of the online fervor of critics of Hillary Clinton, who pestered me for weeks during the campaign about pizza and Clinton aide John Podesta, with absolutely no evidence to back up their charges of child sex trafficking at the restaurant.

The restaurant that is nothing more than a local pizza joint.

But even when police moved in on what otherwise should have been an unremarkable Sunday afternoon at a pizza joint in D.C., it wasn’t hard to find conspiracy theories that were not going away.